This story originally appeared in the Sunday, September 30, 2007 edition of The Kansas City Star

Warning: After leafing through the October issue of Martha Stewart Living, you may be tempted to quit your job and spend the rest of your life decorating the house for Halloween.

As usual, Martha’s magazine does a fabulous job of eliciting the season. Maybe we’re just sick of summer, but the moodily lit photographs of fallen leaves, chrysanthemums, pumpkins and gourds get us excited about autumn.

Among the ideas:

Cover the Halloween table with a large piece of rumpled white gauze (see photo). Leave the edges raw and then pull some threads to suggest cobwebs. For a border, use a rotary cutter with decorative blade to cut zigzags from black tissue paper.

Glue ultrafine glitter on plastic skeleton parts -- tibias, femurs, skulls. For an oddly compelling display, Martha piles green-glittered bones under the huge glass dome of a cheese plate. Or place a sparkly silver bony hand on a traditional-looking black and white plate and prop a place card among the knuckles.

Make creepy candles. Stand white tapers upright in a bucket of sand. Light a red candle and let the melted wax drip down the sides of the white candles like blood.

Here’s a good way to get rid of leftover Halloween candy. Fill cupcake liners halfway with cake batter, stick a small piece of chocolate candy in the middle and cover with more batter. These cupcakes would be especially tasty with candy like Reese’s peanut butter cups. Now, if Martha could just find a way to recycle those lame Dum Dum lollipops ...